


I've been meaning to tell you I've got this feeling that won't subside

by pollyrepeat



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-21
Updated: 2012-02-21
Packaged: 2017-10-31 13:38:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/344638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pollyrepeat/pseuds/pollyrepeat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Phil Coulson prepares to take on the entire universe, plays dead, has a series of tiny adventures with Clint Barton, and solves a problem of his own making.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I've been meaning to tell you I've got this feeling that won't subside

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks, as always, to jonesandashes, who makes everything I write better, and generously took time away from Starks (of the Winterfell variety) to help improve this one. Thanks as well to the folks of c/c chat and their endless enthusiasm and cheer-leading, and whose high-quality-high-output works helped make this one possible. One last thank-you for lanyon, who told me the best and nicest thing out of the blue with, I'm certain, no idea of how much I needed to hear it at that exact moment. <3

“Oh noooooooooo-” Clint’s voice comes through the radio in Phil’s ear, strangely high-pitched and squeaky at the end. 

“Hawkeye, report,” Phil says. He watches from the shadow of a twenty-story building as Captain America wallops another giant robot into the side of it. The building rumbles, ominously. Silence from the radio.

“Hawkeye, _report_ ,” Phil says again. “Anyone have eyes on Hawkeye?” 

Natasha radios in to say, “So, this is strange,” but then there’s someone in front of him, Phil’s brain processing _threat_ before he’s fully registered what’s happening - but something that feels hot and sharp and _burning_ pours over Phil like a wave and the next time he feels capable of thought he’s in a glass jar with holes poked in the lid, the way small children keep ladybugs, rattling around inside some sort of bag. Although his frame of reference is a bit covered-in-darkness, he has a terrible suspicion that he’s … shrunk.

Three inches tall and kidnapped by an evil “magician” who apparently deserves the title without the condescending scare quotes. 

… Okay. Just another day at work. 

Phil fishes around in his pockets. Supplies: four paperclips, one cell phone, one scrap of paper Barton tried to hand him that says only, ‘0400 shot bad guy, situation resolved’, which Phil refused to file on principle but hasn’t quite gotten around to throwing out yet. His sidearm is long gone, crumpled under a giant robot, and his backup disappeared somewhere between extreme pain - strange but good that none of that seems to have lingered - and waking up three inches tall. God only knows where the radio earpiece went. He pulls out the smart-phone. No service, but it’ll function as a flashlight.

The probably-a-bag is barely illuminated by his phone, but it gives him just enough light to be able to tell that there’s a second jar in the space with him, clinking gently against his own. In the half-light, he can see Clint, curled up very, very still at the bottom of it. 

“Barton,” Phil says, pressing up to the side of the glass. His throat, he discovers, is desert-dry. He clears it. “ _Barton_.”

There’s no response. Hawkeye’s bow and quiver are both slung across his chest, so that’s something, at least. Or it would be if he were _conscious_. The longer Clint is out, the greater the possibility of traumatic brain injury, although if the unconscious state is due to the transformation and unrelated to any damage he may have taken before they were shrunk, all bets are off.

Two days ago, Phil asked for time to think. If he and Clint die in glass jars before Phil gets a chance to both undo the inadvertent damage he caused and deliver his answer, Phil is going to have some serious fucking words with the universe.

The universe would not enjoy the experience, just in case that wasn’t clear. Phil is very thorough.

***

The man who has kidnapped them does not appear to be very thorough, but the current situation is not allowing Phil to take as full an advantage of that as he would like. He turns the phone light back on at five minute intervals to check on the situation - and Clint - and listens to a car engine turning off, then footsteps, and then suffers the bruising indignity of the bag being jostled up and swung around. More footsteps. A door lock. Thirteen steps. And then - not in any way gentle - the bag is dropped onto a flat surface, the jars plucked out and set on what appears to be a fairly filthy kitchen counter.

“Hello,” says a booming voice. Phil, struggling to reorient himself, has a feeling that the speaker intended it to sound ominous. He looks up, and up, and up.

“Hello,” says Phil. He voices echoes around the jar, and a man looms closer, face scrunching up. He’s tall and lanky, wearing hipster glasses and a truly unfortunate neck beard.

“You may have noticed by now that your situation is hopeless. You’re going to tell me everything I need to know,” the man says. “You’re going to tell me more information than I even _need_. And once you’ve helped me out, I will reverse the process and let you go back and tell SHIELD that I’m going to destroy them with the information you’ve given me.”

Phil has a great poker face. Last Friday it netted him three-quarters of a wheel of brie (consumed over the next two days), a kitten (smuggled into the Avengers mansion and promptly adopted by JARVIS, much to Tony’s despair and Phil’s quietly undying delight), and a throwing star (given away to Natasha).

SHIELD poker games are often played more for the increasingly surreal stakes than for any sort of capitalist gain.

Today, Phil’s poker face means that he will not be showing any of the derision, amusement, and growing rage that he actually feels toward this man. “All right, listen,” Phil says, hands up, voice even. “I wish I could help you. I do. But SHIELD is ultimately impenetrable. Trust me, I helped make it that way. Even if you could find some part of it to sink your teeth into-”

“Seems I have,” the man grunts.

Phil makes a noncommittal gesture. “You can’t compromise the whole organization this way. I don’t _know_ enough to inflict catastrophic damage. No one person does; that’s how it was designed. I applaud your … creativity, here, but it’s just not possible.” He furrows his brow thoughtfully, and does not glance at Barton. “Unless...”

The man leans forward. Phil does too, and then staggers back, clutching at his shoulder. 

“Unless _what_ ,” says the man. Phil falls to his knees, groaning. 

“Aughh.” 

The man doesn’t act until Phil collapses to the bottom of the jar, glass pressed up against his face, and stops moving. The man wiggles the jar a little. Phil lets his head loll. Some magnificent brat tried this on Supernanny once, but then didn’t have the sense to commit when his father was reduced to hysterics. Jo Frost’s tight-lipped composure when she’d sentenced the kid to the naughty stool “this instant, for the foreseeable future” had been nothing short of spectacular. 

This man’s idea of proportional consequences, if Phil has to wager a guess, would be extremely unpleasant. When he finally pops the jar’s lid, cursing, and shakes Phil out onto the counter, Phil remains steadfastly boneless. The man prods him in the side with a finger. Phil waits.

“ _Shit_ ,” says the man, with feeling. He shuffles away. Phil opens an eye. The man is hunched over his computer at the kitchen table, typing HEART ATTACK SYMPTOMS??? into Internet Explorer with two fingers. 

Phil rolls to his feet and scurries toward Barton, as silent as a trained operative of SHIELD only three inches tall and currently attempting to escape the clutches of a crazy person. Clint is no longer lying prone on the bottom of his jar - Phil’s gut does an uncomfortable and relieved lurch - but standing on the side closest Phil, eyes wide. When Phil is only a few steps away, Clint makes a series of alarmed hand motions to his left. A rustling of giant-sized clothes rises from the kitchen table. 

Phil executes a running dive into the nearest thing large enough to hide him: a porcelain sugar bowl. It’s only half full. He presses himself against the curved interior nearest the counter’s edge. The bowl’s diameter is considerably larger than the opening on top - even viewed from above, he won’t be visible. Probably. 

That still doesn’t solve the problem of Clint, stuck in his-

Outside the sugar bowl, Phil can hear the sound of a jar lid unscrewing, and then Clint’s voice, shouting, “Wait, hey, _ow_ -” and cut off abruptly.

“Where’d you go? Show yourself,” the man demands. “You can’t have gotten far.”

Phil shifts in the bowl. His shoes are full of sugar and he is deeply unimpressed with the direction the day is going. Enormous footsteps pace toward him, then away, then toward, and then finally off in the direction of what Phil’s ten-second recon identified as the washroom. He chances a peek over the top of the bowl and, spotting only the man’s back, hoists himself over the top and sprints across the counter, trailing sugar powder behind him. There is a stack of opened mail scattered across it, and Phil scrambles across a set of letters all addressed to one Carl Drew. Really? Is this amateur hour? 

“Show yourself,” Carl Drew calls from the washroom, “or I drop your little friend and _flush_.”

Phil flattens himself against a grimy backsplash, breathing carefully and quietly. On one level, he registers the utter absurdity of the situation; on another, more urgent level, he’s aware that the bitter taste in his mouth is adrenaline. His heart is pounding hard in his chest, tucked safely behind layers of cashmere and wool blend and Kevlar. Clint dangles limply from the man’s fingers, just visible through the open door. Phil notes, with fairly high levels of concern, that Carl’s grip is very tight and also that Clint is currently very small. “How do I know your enormous sausage fingers aren’t killing him already?” Phil shouts. 

“Well, I suppose you don’t,” Carl says, peering around. “That’s really not my problem.”

If Clint is killed by giant sausage fingers, three inches tall or not, Phil is absolutely going to _make it_ Carl Drew’s problem. It’s going to be the last problem this asshole ever has. His brain is working furiously, but every option he comes up with ends with Clint being _flushed down a toilet_ or otherwise suffering serious bodily harm, and he can find no path that will end happily for both of them. Bluff? Phil doesn’t actually trust that this jackass won’t drop Clint just to be contrary, but at least if he indicates that Clint is important, is _necessary_ , Carl may keep him around for leverage, which means more options, more opportunities for a successful escape.

Not ideal. Better than the alternative.

“All right,” Phil says. He concentrates on his body language, on folding his posture in and looking, well. Smaller than he actually is. He steps out toward the center of the counter again. “Just put him down. Slowly. Somewhere safe.”

Phil is, unfortunately, somewhat experienced with the ways in which madmen will deliberately misunderstand you. 

“Yeah, no,” Carl says. “You crawl back into your jar, first.”

“All right,” Phil says again. He moves back toward the tipped-over jar and stops beside it. “At the same-”

Carl whirls around so his back is to Phil, blocking his view of the inside of the washroom, and Phil thinks, _no_. The toilet flushes even as Phil sprints back along the counter, uselessly, heading toward - nothing at all. Carl is back in the kitchen in two steps, empty-handed, and Phil is tumbled back in his jar and _Carl’s hands are empty_ and the toilet makes sad little gurgling noises in the background.

Those are going to be exactly the same noises Carl is going to make.

***

Carl seems to realize that he’s not getting anything else out of Phil today, just as Phil recognizes that Carl has zero intention of letting Phil out of the jar again, and they both retreat to their respective corners. Phil sits at the bottom of his jar and watches as Carl stomps off toward what is probably the bedroom, carefully leaves the door partially open, and starts up some sort of rock music at top volume - the same kind Tony listens to, actually. Phil remembers hearing it, faintly, in the locker room in the Avengers Mansion when he and Clint-

No. He’s not thinking about that right now.

Bereft of anything else to do, Phil opens a mental file folder and starts to compile a list of overdue field reports from various members of the Avengers Initiative, steering carefully and deliberately clear of Clint’s. Later. He’ll think about it later. He’s halfway through Stark’s transgressions when an arrow appears out of nowhere, embedding itself into the side of the glass jar, where it immediately begins to make an ominous _tick tick_ noise. Phil hits the ground and covers his head.

_Boom_.

He sits up, carefully, hoping that he isn’t inhaling tiny shards of glass that are going to shred his lungs. It feels as though something like that is happening anyway, unfolding slowly and tentatively in his chest. Some of the larger pieces of glass shower off the folds of his suit as he shifts, clattering onto the counter-top. “Hawkeye?”

The music coming from the bedroom goes silent - the end of a playlist? - and a second arrow twangs into the side of the counter, a thin, nylon rope unravelling behind it. “Hey, Coulson,” Clint’s voice drifts up from below. “There is now a deeply unconscious guy in the bedroom and I am definitely not cleaning it up.”

“I thought you might be dead,” Phil says, in a normal speaking voice. He stands up, starting off a second glass shower. A couple pieces skitter across the counter-top and over the edge.

“Did you say something?” Clint calls.

“No,” Phil calls back. He peers over the edge of the counter and tests the arrow’s hold. Far, far below, he can just make out the expression on Clint’s face. It’s a complex mix of _annoyed_ and _frustrated_ with just a hint of _tentative_. That last part was Phil’s doing, and he’s going to fix it. He is. He might even be able to fix it before he fixes the part where they’re stuck being tiny and kidnapped. 

“Okay,” says Clint. He looks suspicious, too, but he looks like that a lot so Phil usually filters it out of his Barton-Facial-Analyses. “Just FYI: that was dumb, earlier, giving yourself up like that.”

“Says the man who fired an exploding arrow at the glass container I was trapped under,” Phil retorts, looping a coil of rope around his arm and testing the arrow’s hold again.

“Jump, Coulson,” Clint suggests pleasantly.

Phil jumps.

“He stuck me in his pocket,” Clint tells him, when Phil gets to the bottom and claps a hand on Clint’s shoulder and squeezes. “When he turned around - he dumped me in his pocket. I would have signalled, but, you know.”

“Pocket,” says Phil.

“Yeah,” says Clint.

They use Clint’s last grappling arrow to scale the kitchen table, the promise of the laptop and its _active internet connection_ beckoning them onward. They immediately discover a couple of problems. 

“It’s locked,” says Clint, after rubbing his hand over the touch-pad.

“We’re going to have to jump around on the keyboard in order to hit the combination of keys I need to crack it,” Phil says, feeling a headache coming on. Phil stands on the edge of the laptop, directing Clint from key to key, but they have to call an abrupt halt when the laptop makes a series of distressed-sounding _beep_ noises, followed by the laptop screen turning blue with great finality.

They stare at it for a moment. “Stairs,” Phil says.

***

“How did you put him down?” Phil asks. They’ve trekked silently and stealthily across a freezing concrete wasteland, only to come up against a truly unpleasant length of stairs heading up toward sunlight and, presumably, freedom. They stall momentarily at the bottom, evaluating the situation.

Clint shrugs. “Arrow through the eye is still an arrow through the eye, even when it’s the size of a needle. Especially when it’s an _exploding_ needle.” He points up. “Gimme a boost?”

“Please bear in mind that those two sentences will not be taken as an alternative to the report you’ll file when we finish up here,” Phil says, and gives Clint a boost up to the stud nail sticking out halfway up the step. His hands do not linger. Clint catches hold of it, swings precariously for a moment, and then scrambles up and over the edge.

“Huh. There’s a bug up here,” Clint says, out of sight.

“Alive or dead?”

“Well, that depends if it decides to eat me or not.”

“Barton.”

“It’s got hungry eyes,” Clint says. “A loooooot of hungry eyes.”

Sometimes it’s impossible to tell if Clint is just yanking chains, or actually means what he says. Phil enjoys this even when it’s directed at him. “Hurry it up, Agent Barton,” he says. “We have approximately thirteen steps to climb and the sooner we do that, the sooner we get to go be normal sized again.”

There is only ominous silence from the next stair up. Phil waits three heartbeats, listening intently. He thinks, maybe, he can hear scuffling. “Barton?”

“One minute,” Clint sing-songs.

“Barton, I swear to god-”

“Whoa, hairy spider legs - oh my god-”

“I’m coming up there-”

There’s a _twang_ , then a _thunk_. “It’s cool, it’s cool, I got it!”

Phil pauses, drawing up slowly from the crouch he was going to use to launch himself to the rescue. “You ‘got it’?”

Clint pokes his head over the side of the step. “I got it.”

Phil stares up at him for a moment, then says, “If it’s a spider, it’s not a bug.”

Clint’s face is flushed, hair sticking out at more angles than usual. He grins. “Phil, I just won a battle with a _huge-ass bug_ that was maybe trying to eat me. I think we can both agree that apart from all the things that are wrong with this scenario, there was a little bit of awesomeness there.”

Phil exhales. Inhales. Exhales. Clint Barton has flashed him that same grin a thousand times before. Nothing is different. He adds that to his mental file folder of arguments. “Next one’s mine,” he says, allowing his mouth to quirk up in a deliberate smile, and Clint leans into space to offer him his hand.

Thirteen stairs, on average, between floors with eight-foot ceilings. If this place was a warehouse of some sort, or God help them, a _bunker_ , there would be many, many more, but what it resembles more than anything is a slightly grungy, unfinished basement suite. Thirteen stairs with a seven inch rise; five seconds of work at normal size, or twenty minutes of work at three inches of height, assuming optimal speeds and no boss battles with spiders.

They rest again when Phil joins Clint on the second step, where Clint moves purposefully into Phil’s personal space and reaches into his suit jacket’s inner pocket to fish out the phone. This, too, is something that has happened before. “One picture of my _spider_ ,” Clint says.

“Just so long as it’s quick,” Phil says. “We need to get backup to take Carl in and find out what he knows before he dies of shock or wakes up and makes a run for it.”

“Carl?” Clint wonders, quirking an eyebrow. He absently pats Phil’s jacket closed.

“Amateur hour,” Phil says. He stands very still.

Clint pauses, one hand still resting lightly on Phil’s lapel. “Amateur hour,” he echoes.

Three days ago, Phil hadn’t known what Clint’s hands would feel like against his skin, calloused fingers digging into his hips as they moved against each other, urgent urgent _urgent_ in the aftermath of an adrenaline high, of _we almost died_ and _we’re both alive_ and years of sitting side-by-side watching bad TV and watching each other’s backs - and now that he does he can’t un-know it.

To be honest, he doesn’t actually _want_ to un-know it.

***

They rest again on the tenth step, gathering energy for the last push for freedom. There’s a closed door at the top, and opening it won’t be easy.

Phil can feel Clint’s gaze on him, steady and unwavering as they sit side-by-side. “I asked for time to think,” says Phil.

“I remember.” When Phil looks over, Clint has shifted his eyes to gaze studiously off into the distance, carefully avoiding eye contact: cautious, now, in a way that he never is when firing arrows or leaping off of tall buildings.

“It wasn’t intended to be a - it wasn’t a brush-off. And what happened doesn’t change anything.”

“No?”

“No,” Phil says. “Everything we did before - that’s still what we do, whatever happens or doesn’t happen. Today is a good example of that.”

“Being as tall as someone’s index finger is a good example?” Clint says, cracking a smile. He’s not looking at Phil, yet, but his body language is relaxing again, bit by bit.

“We’re good at this,” Phil says, as firmly as he knows how, and there is a terrible scream rising from down the stairs and around the corner, from what Phil resignedly suspects is the bedroom. 

“ _Of course_ ,” Clint says, darkly, even as they’re both scrambling to their feet. “I preferred the spider.”

Carl stumbles out into the main room and slowly collapses down to his knees, just within sight from their vantage point on the tenth step. He moans pathetically into the concrete.

Phil exchanges a look with Clint, and they shrug simultaneously. _Amateur hour_ , Clint mouths at him, and they begin to climb the steps again. At the eleventh step, Phil glances back and discovers that Carl has turned his head and is staring in their direction, one eye squeezed shut and crusted with dried blood. 

It’s actually a little disquieting.

“He’s not moving, though,” Clint says, when Phil points this out, and this is true enough. They keep going. At the twelfth step, Carl _has_ moved. He’s crawled all the way to the bottom of the stairs and is slumped against the first few steps, his chin propped on one of them and his single good eye focused unerringly on them.

“Faster,” Phil says. 

At the thirteenth step - at the top, at the landing, at almost-freedom - Carl surges up the stairs behind them on his hands and knees, snarling something unintelligible. His hands reach up over the step first, searching and grasping, while Phil and Clint race out of reach, stumbling across uneven carpeting. Clint reaches back for an arrow, the tip of which is all gleaming sharp edges, and passes it to Phil; he has another arrow in his hand and notched in his bow before Phil manages to snap the shaft of his own arrow across his knee, cutting it down to a more manageable size for knife-work.

“Next one’s mine,” Phil says, reminding him.

“This is _not a spider_ , Phil,” Clint hisses, but he takes another two steps back, waits for Carl’s face to clear the edge of the landing.

Phil doesn’t wait. He sprints back across the landing and leaps for the sleeve of Carl’s sweater just as Carl crashes up onto the landing, bellowing as Hawkeye’s arrow - of the non-exploding variety - hits his good eye; he stomps furiously up and down, blindly attempting to squash Clint under his shoes and Phil is _so done_ with Carl Drew. He grabs fistfuls of fabric and swarms his way up the inside of Carl’s sleeve, landing just above his elbow and stabbing blindly down with the tip of the arrow. There’s a lot of blood after that. Carl screams, stumbles, crashes into what Phil fervently hopes is the door - there’s a splintering sound, so maybe they’ll be able to get out after all.

Phil hangs on grimly to the inside of Carl’s sleeve until Carl has settled, unmoving, on the floor, and then crawls his way up and out of the hoodie’s neck hole. Clint is just visible on the other side of Carl’s legs. His face is sheet-white.

Phil struggles across Carl’s chest - still rising and falling with breath - and slides down to land beside Clint. He wants to rip Clint’s uniform off; wants to press their mouths together and run his hands through Clint’s hair and up along the inside of his thigh – but there’s blood drying on his hands and his clothes and he desperately, desperately craves a shower. All of that will have to wait. This conversation won’t. He can’t un-know this and he doesn’t want to. “I’ve had my time to think,” Phil announces.

“Yeah?” Clint says.

“Yes. And I - You know that I like to - I like to assess a situation before I leap into it.”

“Sure,” Clint says.

“I didn’t handle things very well in our particular case,” Phil says.

“Yeah,” Clint says, again.

“My point is - if you’d still like to. I’d like to try.”

Clint’s answering grin is like the sun coming out. Or, wait, that’s actually the door opening.

“MIGHTY COMRADES,” booms a voice that can only belong to Thor. “WE HAVE COME TO YOUR AID.”

***

“From what we can tell,” Steve says during preliminary debrief forty minutes later, after the thumbs-up from a set of fascinated medics, “Carl Drew is an opportunist. He didn’t have anything to do with the giant robots; he just took advantage of the timing to get to us. He stole some sort of tech that - well, shrinks people-”

“It’s okay, Cap, you can call it a shrink ray,” Tony’s voice floats in from the hallway, sounding strangely amplified. He probably has some sort of microphone, Phil thinks sourly. His own throat is raw from all the shouting. Tony was the only shrunk Avenger to escape being kidnapped away in a glass jar. He’s been insufferable. Even the sight of Carl Drew, unconscious on the landing and evidence of a daring self-rescue, had not been enough to prevent increasingly unsubtle digs.

Tony swaggers into sight - or rather, he swaggers as well as someone three inches tall and riding on top of a robot with wheels can possibly swagger. He’s wearing a cheap-looking red and gold dressing gown. “Check it out,” he says. “My action figure has lounge clothes! Well, had. I have them now.”

“You are your very own pose-able action figure,” Natasha says, not looking up from her tablet.

Tony ignores this, as he often does with Natasha’s snarkier remarks. He apparently finds it safer to just pretend nothing has happened, which is almost as amusing as when he can’t seem to help himself and epic snark battles ensue.

“Look,” says Clint, “as fascinating as we all find Tony’s fashion choices, _when do we get to be regular-sized again_.“

Bruce’s head snaps up from his note-taking. “Oh,” he says. “Well. Okay. Here’s the thing-”

Phil’s heart sinks in his chest.

“-as far as we can tell it’s going to take at least another sixteen hours for the foreign property - and maybe it’s science and maybe it’s magic; we don’t … _exactly_ … know - to work its way out of your system.”

“... That’s it?” Tony asks.

“Yes?” Bruce says. “I’m sorry I can’t give you a more exact timeline.”

Clint cheers. “Tony,” he shouts. “Can you give me and Coulson a ride to my room?”

Phil’s expression does not change, but everyone else’s does. 

“It’s better to tell him now,” Clint tells Phil, quietly, as Thor proclaims his loud congratulations. “You know he’ll just pretend to have no idea and ‘accidentally’ arrange everything so we never get to-”

“Very astute,” Phil says.

Tony has a look on his face that Phil recognizes. “Please note,” says Phil, “that I have a folder full of background files on you.”

“I’ve had my sense of embarrassment surgically removed,” says Tony. 

“I noticed,” says Phil. “I’m sure Captain America wouldn’t be interested in seeing any of those files anyway.”

“I don’t believe in blackmail,” says Steve. “But I really would.”

“Oh and _speaking of blackmail_ ,” Tony says, in a voice that means Phil’s won, “everyone here who is not three inches tall: please note that I have my own _special files_ on each and every one of you, and if any pictures or video from this incident get out I am fully prepared to use them.” 

Natasha snorts.

“Weeeell, now that the threats portion of the meeting is over,” says Clint, “I would really like to wash the spider guts off my arms and also Phil and I need to have a long overdue … conversation.”

“Oh my _god_ ,” Tony says, but he maneuvers the robot around the table to pick them up. Natasha holds up her index finger for Clint to slap in the tiniest of high-fives.

***

“Is this going to be weird?” Clint wonders, later, as Phil is diligently working to divest him of his shirt. Phil pauses, unsure of where this is going. 

“Weird?” Phil asks.

“I mean, we’re pretty tiny.”

Oh. “We’re on the same scale,” says Phil. “I think we’ll be fine.”

“You’re not just talking about our current sizes, are you,” Clint says, already laughing a little, and it’s kind of true, so Phil cups a hand around his jaw, pulls him in close and kisses him - and okay, it is a little weird, with the bedroom furniture and the whole world, for the moment, looming up and around them, but in all the ways that aren’t temporary it isn’t strange at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, you are correct, that title is from Eric Carmen's "Hungry Eyes". Possibly it's in your head now. You're welcome.


End file.
